“Myles, as far as I’m concerned, things haven’t been right since Hilary died. Twenty-nine years ago, this past Labor Day. Twenty-nine years, two months, and nine days.”

“You never have gotten over it, have you?”

She was silent for a while, thinking, She would have been forty-nine this year. Hard to picture the golden girl as a middle-aged woman.

“No, I guess I haven’t,” she answered finally. “And what happened to her didn’t have a thing to do with the sixties or the war. It had everything to do with my father and—”

The clock tolled four and there was a light tap on the door: Maria, the live-in nurse’s aide who saw to Myles’s needs and soothed his pains and put up with his spells of irascibility like a tolerant wife.

“Time for your checkup.”

Bearing stethoscope, blood pressure gauge, and a vinyl bag containing a clean catheter and plastic bladder, she slipped into the room, her child-sized sneakers making a mousy squeal. She was a Filipina only a couple of inches taller on her feet than her patient was sitting down, but she had a stature and a presence vouchsafed by her strict air of competent authority.

“Take your medications at three?” she asked, with a kind of gentle severity, and set her things on the window seat, beside a tray upon which a phalanx of squat brown prescription bottles guarded a plastic water pitcher.

“Which one?”

“Blood thinner.”

“Forgot.”

“You must take it, Mr. Myles, or you’ll go back to the hospital. I can’t watch you every second.”

“Ah, what’s the point? What is the point?”

Maria opened one of the bottles and filled a glass from the pitcher, the point so obvious to her that Myles’s question wasn’t worth answering.

“My father was seventy-six years old and lathering up to shave, and dead when he hit the floor,” he said after gulping the pill down. “Nowadays, EMS would be over in minutes and put those awful clappers on his chest and get his old ticker running again. Then tubes up his backside, in his nose, his mouth and there we are, a miracle of modern medicine, a living corpse, until someone has the decency to pull all that stuff out of him.”

“Cooking lady wants to know, two for supper or one?”

With a look, Myles asked Sybil if she would like to stay, but he wasn’t asking really, he was imploring. She hesitated, thinking, Maybe he has nothing to tell me, only wants company at the dinner table. Almost eighty now and alone, except for Maria and Corinne … She nodded.

“Two,” he told Maria. “Don’t see the point of my eating, either. Used to worry about my weight, and now, ha! Got a golf ball for a belly.”

Maria slipped the stethoscope over her neck, then opened Myles’s flannel shirt, exposing a sternum ribbed and ridged and cobwebbed with dry gray hairs.